A New Life is certainly a game where the moniker “short but sweet” applies. It doesn’t take long to get through it but it ends up using it’sA New Life is certainly a game where the moniker “short but sweet” applies. It doesn’t take long to get through it but it ends up using it’s time wisely to get you invested in it’s world and characters. It gives you a good amount of choices throughout to try to drive the story where you want it to go. You usually end up at a different type of a similar result but in this case I won’t fault the game. Without spoiling anything I will just say about the different endings “such is life”. It had a realistic and relatable quality to it in that sometimes no matter which path you take you won’t get a happy result. The art style was great and once again shows what I have always said about Angela He’s games that they always make their work seem different from other works they have done and stand out from other games in the same genre. The game takes place as journal entries of May in visual form and chronicles moments of your relationship with her. The music was very well done, subtle but soothing.
I played A New Life on Linux. It never crashed on me. The game auto saves at certain points but those points are not made apparent through a saving icon as far as I could tell. There is one graphics option. There is no option to skip to the next choice. These things were a bit of a detractor. I had a power outage while playing and had to redo a couple scenes that had I been able to manually save at points wouldn’t have been an issue.
Game Engine: Unity
Save System: Auto
Disk Space Usage: 134 MB
CPU Usage: 5-32 %
RAM Usage: 1.5-1.8 GB
Overall I enjoyed A New Life. It could have benefited from more length to tell more of the details during the middle and epilogue but at the same time was solid as it was. I also feel a manual save system would make it easier to see the outcome of different choices without having to replay the whole game or scenes. I finished my first play through in 27 minutes. I paid $6.48 CAD for it and feel that is more than fair value. I would rank it below Missed Messages but above He Beat her and I Woke Up Next To You Again in terms of Angela He’s work.
My Score: 7.5
My System:
Intel I5-4590 | 16GB DDR3-1333 | Intel HD 4600 1536MB | Mesa 20.0.8 | Mushkin SSD 120GB | Trisquel 9.0 | Mate 1.20.0 | Kernel 5.4.77-gnu… Expand
